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Will Allen (photo credit: Joe Picciolo)

This is a guest post written by Will Allen, a MacArthur fellow, urban farmer and co-author of the new book “The Good Food Revolution.”

By Will Allen

My parents grew up as sharecroppers, so they knew how hard the work of farming could be. They grew up in the Great Depression, in an era when much of the work of agriculture was still done by hand. The promise of the "green revolution"- a movement that began in the 1940s - was to improve crop yields through biotechnology, and to replace the hard work done by farmers with technology. Combines replaced scythes.

Roundup Ready herbicides and nitrogen fertilizers replaced manure and compost. Small farmers were encouraged by President Nixon's agricultural secretary, Earl Butz, to "get big or get out."

This reliance on technology has had many benefits. It has increased the yields of farmers and taken a lot of the back-breaking labor out of farming. Yet I feel that the green revolution has also had many hidden costs. In 1930, more than 20 percent of Americans in the workforce worked in agriculture, and farming accounted for nearly 8 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product. By 2002, less than 2 percent of people farmed or fished for a living, and agriculture's percentage of GDP had fallen to less than one percent. In our blind faith in economies of scale, we have actually destroyed jobs in the agricultural sector. A recent U.N. Report also indicates that world hunger has actually increased from forty years ago, in part because of rising food prices associated with the costs of oil.

This is not progress. The future of agriculture cannot rely on technology alone. It needs people. At my organization, Growing Power, we are trying to model a new form of agriculture. On three city acres in the heart of an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood, we grow enough food year-round in our greenhouses to feed ten thousand people. At our facility five blocks from Wisconsin's largest public housing project, we are taking city waste that would otherwise end up in a landfill-beer mash, food waste, coffee grinds-and composting it to create healthy soil. We are feeding this compost to millions of worms, who create a natural fertilizer. We are using this rich soil to grow intensively more than 100 varieties of vegetables. We are also raising 100,000 fish in "aquaponics" systems that resemble natural streams. With the help of a broad solar array and a bio-digester, we are also slowly eliminating our reliance on fossil fuel.

Most private investment and government support for agriculture in the past century went to making large-scale agriculture more "efficient." I think our energies in this century should be devoted instead to making small-scale farming economically sustainable. Our community-based food system in Milwaukee is not dependent in the same way as the industrial system on oil prices, and we are able to feed healthy food to rich and poor alike. Local food systems - where farmers are connected directly to consumers - also can ensure that money stays inside of communities rather than being pulled out into corporate interests. I see a future where old warehouses, rooftops and greenhouses in cities are converted into intensive farms that serve their own communities. I see more small farms on the periphery of urban centers. This new food system will need contractors, architects, construction workers, and not least, new farmers.

It's important that business leaders who have the ability to invest in a new food system think anew.

Will Allen, an urban farmer and MacArthur fellow, is the author with Charles Wilson of The Good Food Revolution, a new book published by Gotham.